Season 2, Episode 21: A plea for nuance

Foreign.

Hey, Michael.

Hey, Diane. Good to see you.

You too, Michael. School is out. I not, I know, not quite for everyone yet, but like, for us, it's out. And I must say, I am relieved. This has been the most challenging school year of my career and quite my life. Wow.

Yeah. Take that sigh of relief. And I suspect you are not the only one, Diane, who's doing that. I totally hear you through this, and I think a large part of the country's with you. Most parents, students, teachers, you know, we're seeing it in the polling data. You kind of get the gig, right? And this is obviously why we started this podcast, to talk through all of these issues that were emanating from the pandemic and to help parents and educators sort of sort through what does this all mean and what's the bigger opportunity? And we obviously continue, Diane, to think this is relevant. You know, that through all of this, it won't just be going back to normal at the end of this, but more meaningful change ultimately. And, you know, coming out of the twin pandemics that we've had, COVID 19 and the racial reckoning, which, frankly, has been with us for some time, but the reckoning part of it being a new piece of it. And obviously, as we wrap up this year, you and I have talked and we think it's important to share our reflections through four themes that we both noticed was recurring several times in our episodes this year. So hopefully this will work for. For our listeners. But before we dive in, I'll make one announcement to folks, which is this is going to be our last podcast of the summer. So, but we won't be gone for long. That means it's going to feel like a hiccup, right, because we're going to return in August and we already have a date set when we're recording. It's August 10th live at ASU GSV Summit. And for the first time ever, Diane and I are going to be in person together recording this, and I'm looking forward to it. Right. We have a lot of topics that we want to tackle and with people back in school buildings for the most part, and, you know, people still wrestling with all of what does this mean? We think these issues are going to continue to be important, and we hope to do a lot of what we've been doing, which is contextualize them, but talk about how they can be implementers for bigger change, essentially.

Michael that's exactly right. And one of the parts of our reflection on this season and debriefing that I really appreciated was that everything we talked about that really surfaced for us, there was such nuance to it. And what I noticed is we just really welcome that nuance. And we often talk about how all the easy problems in the world have been solved, only the hard problems are left. And it turns out hard problems have nuance to them. And so, you know, I just want to start with that before we dive into these four kind of thematic areas, or these were things that kept coming up over the course of the season, we would end each discussion about them saying, oh, my gosh, we could spend another two hours on this easily, you know. And so we want to surface them not only as sort of a reflection on the end of this season, but as a springboard when we, you know, when we return in August, we think these are going to be front and center again and that they deserve to continually be discussed and mined for the richness and the nuance that need to be there if we're going to really move things forward. And so with that, without further ado, I'm going to ask you to kick us off with our first one.

Yeah, first theme. Well, I think it's perfect for this topic, Diane, because it's a place that has lost all sense of nuance, which is our politics. But, you know, the observation that. That we've had, both of us, I think it's fair to say, is that some of this nuance actually has problems when you don't realize sort of how it plays out in the politics. And one observation that I had over the course of this podcast is when we started recording it, we were in a very different political context than we are now. And one of the things that a lot of people were upset about is the politicization of the science and the interpret of the findings that researchers were having and how that was playing out into daily decisions in our lives and schools and so forth. But what was interesting, I think, was when it flipped, we flipped administrations, we had an election, and. And the Biden administration came in. A lot of those dynamics didn't fully go away, Diane. And the one observation that I had in particular was in some ways, actually the elimination of politics from certain decisions actually proved pretty problematic, too. And I'll try to make the point, and then you can help me tease it out, because I'm going to mess it up a little bit. But the one. The real flash point was for me was when the cdc, you know, this is a few weeks ago, at this point, was going through the data and basically said, I don't think we need masks anymore when we're outside. If you're vaccinated, even if you're inside, you probably don't need masks. It was this huge carrot, right, all of a sudden to get vaccinated. And but rather than just sort of say the research they announced and therefore we don't recommend requiring masks anymore. And they didn't even tell the Biden White House that they were going to do this until like 6pm or something the night before. And I guess my reflection from that, Diane, is I want the researchers and scientists telling us the latest in their understanding of science. Right. I want them saying this is what we've seen in the data. Obviously things can change, there will be anomalies, will update. But I think it's the job of the politicians to say, okay, what do we do as a society about that? Because those are political decisions. There's not a clear black and white answer on reopening versus, you know, versus staying at home, for example. These are very tricky circumstance based questions that do have risks to them on both sides of the equation ultimately. And so that was a big, I think, a helpful thinking in my mind, particularly out of the John Bailey episode and then that decision that was sort of launched on the Biden administration.

Yeah, Michael, as you're talking, we discussed this and it resonated with me. And the thing that's coming up for me right now is when you said it's the job of the politicians and therein lies the nuance and the challenge. The politicians should be first and foremost policymakers. And the reality is education is a heavily regulated, policy driven endeavor. It is what it is. We're dealing with all of the children in our nation. We're dealing with a massive scale institution. There's a lot of policy around it. And I think maybe the nuance here is our policymakers get confused and sometimes put politicianing in front of policy making.

Yeah, that's a very good point.

And so as you were talking, I was like, maybe that's what we're craving. We're craving actual policymakers and we need them to be involved and we need them to be thinking about the science and incorporating it and the decisions they're making. And we need a little bit less of like the running for office and just protecting my seat politician piece of it.

Really good point, Diane, and I appreciate the furthering it. And the other thing and what I might say out of that is we don't need the sloganeering or sort of one size fits all, catch all statements.

Yeah.

What we need is the nuance to stick with our theme, and that's often going to be based on the local community. It might not be a nationwide policy that makes sense. Right. Or it might be a certain community, and we know this. Right. A lot of frontline workers disproportionately low income, minority families disproportionately hit by it. They might need a different response from say, your suburban neighborhood at that particular time. And I think that goes to one of the arts of policymaking that you and I have talked about, which is you got to be really careful about over prescribing from those places about how everything is going to work on the ground because it's just not possible. You need educators working with students to make informed decisions based on what they need. And I think it pushes back on sort of the inclination to stereotype or make broad brush statements about what any group or school or individual needs.

I completely agree. And I think as we go into next year and we return to buildings and we start to see what changes may take hold, hopefully we're both crossing our fingers. It will be really interesting to watch the importance of the difference between federal, state and local policies, because conceptually there's an opportunity here to personalize in the way that you're talking about if we have the appropriate mixture of those policies. But that also is going to suggest that the highest level the policies have, have to be open enough and broad enough where they really can be personalized to local communities and quite frankly, even at the local level, at an individual student level. So lots of interesting nuance that we're going to be able to continue to dig into there.

That's a perfect segue, I think, to

the next topic, Diane, which this one's not going to come as a surprise to anyone. It was a regular theme in our conversation, something that we know, I feel passionate about, which is testing. And I think, Michael, I actually think testing is going to continue to be big. I am growing more and more convinced that this is maybe the biggest, most important lever we have for change going forward. And like, it's the theme of this episode, only if it's nuanced, only if we, you know, bring. There are at least two sides when it comes to testing, at least if not more. The only way we're going to navigate this is if we lean in to really hearing each other and working out third way types of solutions and thinking. Because the binary thinking here that unfortunately has existed for a while and we heard some of over the course of this year is not going to get us where we need to get to. And so. Yeah, I know, super curious.

So I agree completely with you. No surprise there. And it's interesting, there was a vignette that occurred recently. I was hosting this webinar for Outschool, which is one of the organizations that has put lots of online classes out there for students to be able to synchronously take. It's pretty neat place actually. I'll say. And it was with a couple or four educators that I was hosting and one of them was the director of testing in his district, small district in New Mexico actually, I believe uses Summit Learning for their platform. And then a woman who used to be a educator in Puerto Rico, I believe, and now is the president of an association focused on Latinx students. And she was just emphasizing we need data, data, data to improve teaching and learning in the future. And he on the other hand was like, we got to get out of the current testing regime. Like this is just broken. Da, da, da, da. And went on and on and on. And finally I said, I gotta call you guys on this because it sounds like you're arguing against each other, but I want to double click on both of your points. And so I went to him first and said, are you against all kinds of testing? And he said, no, no, no, no, no. Gosh, I'm so glad you asked. That's not what I meant. Of course testing is important for learning, but I want bite size, authentic like, you know, tests that are like in the moment, not too weak on grade level exclusively, tests that we don't get the results back and maybe test things that aren't as important perhaps as other things that we should be working on with students. That's what I want. And then she said, I'm totally in agreement with you. Like, I don't like the current testing either. The data is too backward looking, it's too exposed facto and like. And then they both said, and we need to use that to drive toward mastery learning. And I guess I reflected on it, Diane, because it felt like, wow, it sounded like two totally different polls in the conversation, right? Protesting anti testing data. Right. You double clicked. And there was actually a fair bit of agreement there. And I think it points to, I mean, I think it goes back to the first conversation on the local control that this may play out differently in different localities as long as there's some sort of light third party standard just to keep things reliable and valid in these tests. But I know you're playing with this right now, aren't You, I was going

to say, Michael, along those lines, you know, California did some, really made some interesting decisions. Each state made some decisions this spring. You know, the federal government did not release states of administering spring tests this summer even though kids had been out and whatnot. We had talked a lot about that and traced that and were wondering what was going to happen. It was sort of a late decision. But California actually created an opening for school districts and schools to use alternative assessments. So they offered choice. They said, you know, schools, school districts, you can give the state assessments. They were, they shortened them slightly and they were available online. Or if you can have an assessment that meets these four criteria, essentially is able to compare student groups to each other, actually is aligned to state standards, is reportable to parents, et cetera. If you can meet these four standards, you can give an alternative assessment. I'm really excited to say that our organization was well positioned for that. We have as you know, a project based, mastery based approach to things with built in assessments. And throughout the spring, as a result, our students and our teachers were able to completely continue, continue to focus on skill development and use these assessments for our accountability qualifying assessments. And I'm really excited. I'm sure that was not the right technical term. You can tell it's the end of the year, all of that to say we're really tracking this closely. We're going to be sharing out about it. And so you know, that and, and other experiences, we're going to contrast that with the experience in Washington with our schools where Washington state just decided to put off the assessments until the fall. So very different experiences. It will be interesting to look at the impact of that on students and families and communities and our knowledge of what's happened in schools.

Two things occur to me, Diane, out of that I'm just curious. Your quick take one because you operate in two different states and have two different testing assess, you know, regimes in effect, you're able, I suspect more easily to take your local assessments, I'll call them right these point of time to, to you know, figure out is there real mastery here or not and better able to correlate it, I would suspect, across these sort of national normed assessments because you're, you're, you're working across two different state testing regimes in effect. And then I guess the second question is would you have been able to do what you did this year like say 10 years ago, or was there an evolution that had to happen in Summit to get you to the point where you could have this validity and reliability and comparability and so forth.

Thank you for asking that question. The short answer is no, we weren't capable of this 10 years ago and we have invested vested in educational model and an approach and a set of a curriculum and a platform and data that enabled us to do this. It's aligned with much of what we've been talking about for the last two seasons and what we hear parents and teachers saying they want in their schools. I'm just happy that we're going to maybe be able to show that the power and the opportunity of an investment like that, not just in the day to day learning, but even for this broader understanding of systems and the accountability and reporting out.

Well, if the feds are listening. If the feds are listening to this, Diane, I hope they will look at what you are doing and maybe think about it as an experiment that they might invest in and scale. So I will put my two cents there. But let's shift to number three on our list, which is the where are you learning theme. So where obviously was not something that people thought quite as much about before. I mean maybe we did because of this anytime, any place, sort of learning ethos that some in our community have. But you know, this has become a significant thing, right? Remote learners, people in school, hybrid, et cetera. And what we've seen over the last few weeks develop has been really striking because politicians, so I guess we keep coming back to number one unintentionally, but have been so concerned that so many families have, you know, been scared to go back into their brick and mortar environments and in an effort to get them back in because they've concluded for the majority of students, and I think rightly so, they should be in brick and mortar schools to optimize their learning experience, to optimize for families, et cetera, et cetera. But to do it, they've basically said we're going to ban remote learning or virtual schools rather than say like we're going to make our brick and mortar schools awesome and show how safe they are that you want to be here. And we're seeing so many families, you know, it's not a majority but, but a significant minority. And they tend to be by the way, lumped in minority communities saying we're not so excited about this. And I'm personally tremendously worried about this. It reminds me a lot, I think I've told this story before of what I saw in Korea, where they would just crack down on these private after school hagwons, they call them, these after school Cram schools in effect, and families always found their way around the regulations. They would do tutoring in cars instead of centers, like driving around with a tutor at one in the morning or something crazy like that, rather than the real challenge, which is like make the schools themselves really good and you'll get rid of this demand for these aftermarket of services. And I think the same is true here. But I'm sort of curious your take.

Well, I think what you're surfacing, Michael, is what's so fascinating both about the nuance of these topics, but also maybe policy, politics, politicians went first because it really does infuse everything we're talking about here. I wonder if the motivation for a lot of these folks who are making these kind of mandates is truly around the families or if it's around the people who work in the schools and the folks who are influencing that. I wonder if these mandates are more about just really ensuring that the schools are open and that that's the default place. It's not, it's not super clear to me. It's probably mixed, I mean, you know, across the board. But you know, when we look at those groups as well, there's, there's a lot of teachers, there's a lot of school leaders, there's a lot of administrators who are people in our communities who are also parents who, I mean, this is really complicated, complicated stuff. And you know, when, you know, in my own experience, in our own communities, our folks who are from the global majority, they have been hit significantly harder by the pandemic. The experience they've had is fundamentally different. And quite frankly the long history of their engagement with schools, as many folks have said they weren't being served well before. And so why do I want to go back to the same thing again? And so I think this just takes us back to. Our initial hope has always been that this can be a catalyst for change. And most importantly, can we please, please, please have policy that is flexible enough and open enough, that recognizes different families, different kids, they need different solutions. And so this rush to a one size fits all for maybe a moment in time is really, it's so scary, Michael, that it might, we might be going backwards.

It's incredibly well said, Diane, because I, I think you're right. We could shut out a huge amount of flexibility that's important for a lot of families. And I see a lot of instinct. This actually predates the pandemic. A lot of people, I think correctly concluded that some of the full time virtual schools overgrew their origins and started serving families for whom maybe it wasn't the best fit and they were, you know, trying to duck out of school or something like that. And so I guess my prescription, if you will, but at a local level, not a state level, would be that if you're a district superintendent trying to figure out who's going to do your remote schooling option and who's going to be in person, I would say I. In my judgment, an adult needs to be present. I'm curious what you think of these two policy prescriptions. An adult, I think needs to be present at home, particularly for elementary students. It doesn't have to be the parent. It could be a guardian. It could be in a pod like setting. There's a variety of ways, but I think there does need to be an adult. And second, rather than do it on the front end of saying, oh, you look like a family who could do well in virtual schooling or not, which I think is incredibly problematic, let's monitor academic progress over time. So take something from your testing playbook and look at the actual academic progress. Are we seeing mastery as opposed to seat time logging in on an lms? Are we seeing that child do well and thrive? And if the answer is yes, great, let them keep going. And if it's not, we need to have another conversation about what the right option is. Perhaps.

I like that. And I would offer a friendly amendment to not only academic progress, but holistic progress, the holistic development. I mean, something that's come up several times over the course of the year is how are kids growing and learning in ways that we don't traditionally even acknowledge or value in school settings, but are so critically important to their lives and their happiness and their well being? And so, you know what, an invitation to think more holistically about that. Yeah, it's an interesting segue, I think, into our fourth theme, Michael, which is it subtly came up over the course of the year. And I'm hopeful that we'll actually be able to get more into it in our next season, which is this idea of how we, we should be thinking about and approaching improvements and change from the perspective of doing this with communities as opposed to two communities. And so I think what we mean by that is, and if we go back to all three of the topics we just talked about, rather than policymakers or politicians or district superintendents or whoever it might be, making unilateral decisions on behalf of people, how do we actually work together as local school communities in, in collaboration to really honor and respect and hear all the perspectives and then design accordingly so that we can truly meet the diverse needs of everyone in our community. And that's a very different mindset and approach. Fortunately, there are methodologies and tools and ways for this to happen, but it is not business as usual and it's not the way things are usually done. Yeah. So I'm just curious your thoughts on that.

It's a really good point. I mean, it's interesting because something that you brought to my attention was that, and we talked about it in a previous episode was summer school that a lot of families aren't super excited actually about traditional summer school. And the 74 did a very interesting article with Anna Rosevsky Saavedra. I may have messed up that name. I apologize if so. And Morgan Polakoff, where they basically polled a Representative sample of 1500 K12 parents to ask about how they felt about a range of practices. And what was interesting was that parents are not, not enthusiastic about in person summer school. They're not enthusiastic about in person tutoring or pods, and they're not thrilled about adding instructional time or, you know, other such policies. What's interesting is remote tutoring scored really high. Parents want to use technology for teacher conferences. Like it's a great way to connect. Right. Don't have to do it once a semester. You could actually be maybe more in touch with each other. Right. And there's also this goes back, I suppose, to our other one. There's a big backlash, I would say, in the circles in which we run against asynchronous learning. And what was interesting though was half of parents want their students to be able to work on their own time without a teacher physically present. And so I think what it says is like if we don't listen to and design with, we may get a lot of behavior that is pushing back, opting out, not progressing because there's a lot of disgruntlement or a lot of things that are not working. And you know, the pandemic showed us a couple things. I think one, one size fits all is not the way it's going to work. It never has and it never will. And two, relationships and people's individual needs matter a heck of a lot. And if we're not listening to them, it's going to be a problem.

I think, Michael and what you're doing is bringing home the point that nuance is so critical here because all of those things that you just listed that people aren't excited about or that they are interested in just by describing them, it's really Hard to know exactly what you would. You know, you've got to get underneath all of those. And the only way to get underneath those is to really be engaged with and in conversation with and developing a deep understanding from students and their families and communities to, to then bring that to life in a meaningful way.

Yeah, it's such a good point because you also might look at that survey and be like, okay, we're not doing pods anymore, but what if 20% of your families really want pods?

Right.

I mean, the average is not going to help you here. You've got to get down to the individual level. And I think that's going back to the episode we had with Marguerite Rosa where she said, what about giving dollars to families directly? I think those are very interesting ideas around this.

I think. Exactly right. And all the way back to season one in our conversations with Todd Rose.

Yes, indeed.

The massive shortcomings of averages, especially when you're dealing with the development of human beings, which we will continue to do because that is something we care very deeply about. I think we're both really curious about how this next school year is going to unfold and I think we're also both continue to be really hopeful. We can't help ourselves. We're optimists. We believe in the possibility. And so, you know, we're going to take this short summer break. But before we do that, can we do one final round of. What are you reading? Listening. Listening to, thinking about right now. Michael, let's do it.

You go for you. You go. You go first. What's on your.

Okay, I will. So I had a really hard time choosing this week was I've got a bunch of things but I have to go for crash course. Specifically Crash course, Black American history hosted by Clint Smith. For those who don't know Crash Course, I will say my, my son has always loved crash course. Originally started by John Green, who's an author and former teacher in the history realm. Has expanded over the years. These short, sort of 10 minute, fast paced, really interesting learning segments available online. YouTube. I personally have always. My son, I've watched hundreds of these with my son. At this point I have to rewind and watch them often. He seems to be able to process them better than I do. But there you go. Different learning styles. I love this new series that they have launched, really helping us dig into black American history. Clint Smith, who is a writer and a journalist and a former teacher, is an amazing host. I'm learning a ton. I'm so grateful for it. And you know Coming off this very historic weekend where we have a new, new federal holiday. New federal holiday and a really important day to. To really reflect on and observe the importance of Juneteenth. Yeah, I highly recommend and am really enjoying crash course Black American History.

I love that, Diane. I'll make a quick wreck. This wasn't on my playbook to do, but John Fort, who's an anchor for cnbc, some of you may know, actually built a very neat course called the Black Experience in America because he wanted. He felt like nothing out there was something that he could teach his children about, about, you know, sort of this experience that he saw unfolding. And so he created. It's an online course, actually. And so I highly recommend people check it out. He's trying to get it produced and go bigger and bigger over time. But the ones that were on my radar, I'll do two quick ones. I'm reading, actually a PDF of a book that'll be out in the next few weeks on the History of Teaching Machines by Audrey Waters, and it's a good read so far. And I'm a little less certain that the parallels to today's world are quite as strong as she might imagine them to be. But I don't want to judge yet. And it is a good read. She did a lot of primary research into how a lot of these psychometricians and philosophers and so forth basically develop these tools. And then the second one, I just have to report back. I did finish the Ben Franklin book. I finished all the Walter Isaacson's books, but then he came out with a new one called the Code Breaker. So I'll report back at the start of next year.

Well, I appreciate that, Michael. I will keep an open mind about Audrey's newest book. I will do my best to do that. And I will wait for your report report on Walter's books because you know, I won't be reading those this summer.

Sounds. Sounds like a plan. And for all of you, just huge thanks for listening to Class Disrupted, for your comments, the writing that you've given to both me and Diane, giving us feedback. The ratings obviously help other people find the podcast, and we're just deeply appreciative to all of you and we'll look forward to seeing you in August.